Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

It lurched him completely off his balance and he fell rolling on to his side. With sizzling fury, though it wasn’t I who had pushed him, he raised himself up on one knee and thrust his face close to mine.

�– you,’ he said.

At close quarters I could see how very young he was. His skin was still smooth like a child’s and he had long thick eyelashes round those vast pale blue-grey searchlight eyes. His hair, a fairish brown, curled softly close to his head and down the back of his neck, cut short and in the shape of a helmet.

He had a soft, full-lipped mouth and a strong straight nose. A curiously sexless face. Too unlined to be clearly male, too heavily boned to be female.

He wasn’t so much a man, not even so much a person, as a force. A wild, elemental, poltergeist force trapped barely controllably in a vigorous steel-spring body. You couldn’t look into Billy’s cold eyes from inches away and not know it. I felt a weird unexpected primitive tingle away down somewhere in my gut, and at the same time realised on a conscious level that friendliness and reason couldn’t help, there that would be no winning over, ever, of Billy.

He began mildly enough.

�Your sort,’ he yelled. �You think you own the bloody earth. You soft lot of out-of-date nincompoops[108 - soft lot of out-of-date nincompoops – (сленг) слюнявые допотопные идиоты], you and your lah-di-dah bloody Eton.’

I didn’t answer. He put his sneering face even nearer.

�Think yourself something special, don’t you? You and your sodding ancestors.

’

�They aren’t very usual,’ I yelled in his ear.

�What aren’t?’

�Sodding ancestors.’

He had no sense of humour. He looked blank.

�You didn’t spring from an acorn,’ I said resignedly. �You’ve had as many ancestors as I have.’

He stood up and took a step back. �Bloody typical,’ he shouted, �making fun of people you look down on.’

I shook my head, got to my feet, and went along the plane to check the horses.

I didn’t care for useless arguments at the best of times, let alone those which strained the larynx. All four hurdlers were standing quiet in the boxes, picking peacefully at the haynets, untroubled by the noise. I patted their heads, made sure everything was secure, hesitated about going forward to the galley and cockpit for more friendly company, and had the matter settled for me by Billy.

�Hey,’ he shouted.